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Early life

Nina Foch was born Nina Consuelo Maud Fock[2] in Leiden, Holland. Her mother was American actress and singer Consuelo Flowerton, who returned to the U.S. after her marriage to Foch's father, Dutch classical music conductor Dirk Fock; they divorced when Nina was a toddler.[3][4] As she grew up in New York, her mother encouraged her artistic talent. She played the piano and enjoyed art but was more interested in acting.

Career

Foch's movie fame came during the height of the 1940s, when she played cool, aloof, and often foreign women of sophistication. She would ultimately be featured in over 80 films and hundreds of television shows.

She was cast as Eva Frazier in the Outer Limits episode "The Borderland". On television, she was cast as the first murder victim of the Columbo mystery series starring Peter Falk, appearing in the pilot movie, Prescription: Murder (1968), with Gene Barry as her husband, a homicidal psychiatrist.

Late in her career, she appeared as 'Frannie Halcyon' in the 1994 UK coproduction of Channel Four, Working Title Films and Propaganda Films that adapted Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. She appeared in "War and Remembrance" as the seemingly-nice librarian who soon advises Jane Seymour's character that the best place for her and her uncle would be the un-aptly named "Paradise Ghetto". Another notable TV role was as the Overseer Commander, (or "Kleezantzun/" in the first of the "Alien Nation--The Series" TV Movies, 'Body and Soul'.

Foch taught "Directing the Actor" classes at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, classes she had taught since the 1960s up to her death. She also worked as an independent script-breakdown consultant for many prominent Hollywood directors.

Personal life and death

Foch lived in Beverly Hills, California for 40 years, and had one son, Dr. Dirk de Brito. Foch married 3 times, the first to James Lipton, host of Inside the Actors Studio. She married Dennis Brito in 1959. The couple had one child before divorcing in 1963. Her last marriage, to Michael Dewell in 1967 ended in divorce in 1993.